Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement!

The exclamation point is much maligned. It’s bad style. It’s like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it’s hysterical, it’s maybe even embarrassingly obsequious.

Nasser Hussain disagrees! What’s so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of ‘style’ can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself!

The Point is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang’s and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let’s celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!

Poison? Paranoia?: this 2008 novel of love and fear is more relevant than ever

A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.

Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex’s sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.

Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Encampment, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love.

From the author of Pale Shadows, a delicate reimagining of the relationships that created the great American novel

While writing Moby Dick, Herman Melville meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, an encounter that alters the course of his life and his novel. From this true story of friendship, only a handful of Melville’s letters remain. Inspired by the surviving correspondence, Dominique Fortier imagines the passionate relationship between the two authors: their desires, their domestic arrangements, Melville’s struggle to write, and Hawthorne’s powerful hold over Melville.

Melville’s story is interspersed with the frantic scribbling of Lizzie, his wife, her words flying onto the page, her stream of consciousness ideas and talents not given the same time and space to develop as her husband’s.

A third exchange unfolds between Fortier as she is writing the book and a companion who is half real, half imagined, a man she says is primarily a poem. Forming a bridge between past and present, Fortier’s novel braids together these three parts, telling the story of the most beautiful of shipwrecks, Moby Dick.

Stand By Me meets Knausgaard: an explosive 1980s coming-of-age in a hardscrabble Quebec mining town.

Thetford Mines, an asbestos-mining town in northern Quebec, summer 1986. Nine-year-old Steve Dubois and ten-year-old Poulin revel in the joys of friendship, roaming free on their BMXs, building forts, reading Tintins, filling their disaster scrapbook, sharing escapades on the high slag heaps and landscapes that are part forest, part lunar. The two inseparable friends spend their days in idleness and innocence. But 1986 is a year rife with tragedy, from the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion to one closer to home, one that will rock Thetford Mines, and Steve, to the core. Five years later, we find Steve consumed by his obsession: to recreate his vanished paradise.

Wielding precise and sensual language, Sébastien Dulude tells the story of a fragile and volatile youth in a working-class dream that is losing momentum. Asbestos is cast from a rare ore that could only emerge from Quebec’s hinterlands.